L E D A 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

LIMBO 



LEDA 



BY ALDOUS HUXLEY 



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NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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Gift 
Publisher 



^// r lights reserved 



CONTENTS 

LEDA, I 

THE BIRTH OF GOD, 1 9 

ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH, 2 1 

SYMPATHY, 2 2 

MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM, 23 

FROM THE PILLAR, 24 

JONAH, 25 

VARIATIONS ON A THEME, 26 

A MELODY BY SCARLATTI, 27 

A SUNSET, 28 

LIFE AND ART, 30 

FIRST philosopher's SONG, 3 1 

SECOND philosopher's SONG, 32 

FIFTH philosopher's SONG, 33 

NINTH philosopher's SONG, 34 

MORNING SCENE, 36 

verrey's, 1"^ 

FRASCATl's, 38 

FATIGUE, 39 

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND, 40 

BACK STREETS, 4 1 

LAST THINGS, 42 

GOTHIC, 43 

EVENING PARTY, 44 

BEAUTY, 45 

SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT, 55 



LEDA 



LEDA 

BROWN and bright as an agate, mountain-cool, 
Eurotas singing slips from pool to pool ; 
Down rocky gullies ; through the cavernous pines 
And chestnut groves ; down where the terraced vines 
And gardens overhang ; through valleys grey 
With olive trees, into a soundless bay 
Of the iEgean. Silent and asleep 

Lie those pools now : but where they dream most deep, 
Men sometimes see ripples of shining hair 
And the young grace of bodies pale and bare, 
Shimmering far down — the ghosts these mirrors hold 
Of all the beauty they beheld of old, 

White limbs and heavenly eyes and the hair's river of gold. 
For once these banks were peopled : Spartan [girls 
Loosed here their maiden girdles and their curls, 
And stooping o'er the level water stole 
His darling mirror from the sun through whole 
Rapturous hours of gazing. 

The first star 
Of all this milky constellation, far 
Lovelier than any nymph of wood or green. 
Was she whom Tyndarus had made his queen 
For her sheer beauty and subtly moving grace — 
Leda, the fairest of our mortal race. 



Leda 

Hymen had lit his torches but one week 

About her bed (and still o'er her young cheek 

Passed rosy shadows of those thoughts that sped 

Across her mind, still virgin, still unwed. 

For all her body was her own no more), 

When Leda with her maidens to the shore 

Of bright Eurotas came, to escape the heat 

Of summer noon in waters coolly sweet. 

By a brown pool which opened smooth and clear 

Below the wrinkled water of a weir 

They sat them down under an old fir-tree 

To rest : and to the laughing melody 

Of their sweet speech the river's rippling bore 

A liquid burden, while the sun did pour 

Pure colour out of heaven upon the earth. 

The meadows seethed with the incessant mirth 

Of grasshoppers, seen only when they flew 

Their curves of scarlet or sudden dazzling blue. 

Within the fir-tree's round of unpierced shade 

The maidens sat with laughter and talk, or played, 

Gravely intent, their game of knuckle-bones ; 

Or tossed from hand to hand the old dry cones 

Littered about the tree. And one did sing 

A ballad of some far-off Spartan king. 

Who took a wife, but left her, well-away ! 

Slain by his foes upon their wedding-day. 

" That was a piteous story," Leda sighed, 

" To be a widow ere she was a bride." 

" Better," said one, " to live a virgin life 

Alone, and never know the name of wife 

And bear the ugly burden of a child 

And have great pain by it. Let me live wild, 

A bird untamed by man ! " " Nay," cried another, 

*' I would be wife, if I should not be mother. 



Leda 

Cypris I honour ; let the vulgar pay 

Their gross vows to Lucina when they pray. 

Our finer spirits would be blunted quite 

By bestial teeming ; but Love's rare delight 

Wings the rapt soul towards Olympus' height." 

" Delight ? " cried Leda. " Love to me has brought 

Nothing but pain and a world of shameful thought. 

When they say love is sweet, the poets lie ; 

'Tis but a trick to catch poor maidens by. 

What are their boasted pleasures ? I am queen 

To the most royal king the world has seen ; 

Therefore I should, if any woman might. 

Know at its full that exquisite delight. 

Yet these few days since I was made a wife 

Have held more bitterness than all my life, 

While I was yet a child." The great bright tears 

Slipped through her lashes, " Oh, my childish years ! 

Years that were all my own, too sadly few. 

When I was happy — and yet never knew 

How happy till to-day ! " Her maidens came 

About her as she wept, whispering her name, 

Leda, sweet Leda, with a hundred dear 

Caressing words to soothe her heavy cheer. 

At last she started up with a fierce pride 

Upon her face. " I am a queen," she cried, 

" But had forgotten it a while ; and you. 

Wenches of mine, you were forgetful too. 

Undress me. We would bathe ourself." So proud 

A queen she stood, that all her maidens bowed 

In trembling fear and scarcely dared approach 

To do her bidding. But at last the brooch 

Pinned at her shoulder is undone, the wide 

Girdle of silk beneath her breasts untied ; 

The tunic falls about her feet, and she 



Leda 

Steps from the crocus folds of drapery, 

Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun. 

God-like she stood ; then broke into a run. 

Leaping and laughing in the light, as though 

Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow 

Of generous blood and fire that to remain 

Too long in statued queenliness were pain 

To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy. 

She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, 

Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast. 

Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest. 

If that might be, when she was never less. 

Moving or still, than perfect loveliness. 

At last, with cheeks afire and heaving flank, 

She checked her race, and on the river's bank 

Stood looking down at her own echoed shape 

And at the fish that, aimlessly agape. 

Hung midway up their heaven of flawless glass. 

Like angels waiting for eternity to pass. 

Leda drew breath and plunged ; her gasping cry 

Splashed up ; the water circled brokenly 

Out from that pearly shudder of dipped limbs ; 

The glittering pool laughed up its flowery brims, 

And everything, save the poor fish, rejoiced : 

Their idiot contemplation of the Moist, 

The Cold, the Watery, was in a trice 

Ended when Leda broke their crystal paradise. 

Jove in his high Olympian chamber lay 

Hugely supine, striving to charm away 

In sleep the long, intolerable noon. 

But heedless Morpheus still withheld his boon, 

And Jove upon his silk-pavilioned bed 

Tossed wrathful and awake. His fevered head 



Leda 

Swarmed with a thousand fancies, which forecast 

Delights to be, or savoured pleasures past. 

Closing his eyes, he saw his eagle swift. 

Headlong as his own thunder, stoop and lift 

On pinions upward labouring the prize 

Of beauty ravished for the envious skies. 

He saw again that bright, adulterous pair. 

Trapped by the limping husband unaware, 

Fast in each other's arms, and faster in the snare — 

And laughed remembering. Sometimes his thought 

Went wandering over the earth and sought 

Familiar places — temples by the sea, 

Cities and islands ; here a sacred tree 

And there a cavern of shy nymphs. 

He rolled 
About his bed, in many a rich fold 
Crumpling his Babylonian coverlet, 

And yawned and stretched. The smell of his own sweat 
Brought back to mind his Libyan desert-fane 
Of mottled granite, with its endless train 
Of pilgrim camels, reeking towards the sky 
Ammonian incense to his horned deity ; 
The while their masters worshipped, offering 
Huge teeth of ivory, while some would bring 
Their Ethiop wives — sleek wineskins of black silk, 
Jellied and huge from drinking asses' milk 
Through years of tropical idleness, to pray 
For offspring (whom he ever sent away 
With prayers unanswered, lest their ebon race 
Might breed and blacken the earth's comely face). 
Noon pressed on him a hotter, heavier weight. 
O Love in Idleness ! how celibate 
He felt ! Libido like a nemesis 
Scourged him with itching memories of bliss. 



Leda 

The satin of imagined skin was sleek 

And supply warm against his lips and cheek, 

And deep within soft hair's dishevelled dusk 

His eyelids fluttered ; like a flowery musk 

The scent of a young body seemed to float 

Faintly about him, close and yet remote — 

For perfume and the essence of music dwell 

In other worlds among the asphodel 

Of unembodied Hfe. Then all had flown ; 

His dream had melted. In his bed, alone. 

Jove sweating lay and moaned, and longed in vain 

To stiU the pulses of his burning pain. 

In sheer despair at last he leapt from bed. 

Opened the window and thrust forth his head 

Into Olympian ether. One fierce frown 

Rifted the clouds, and he was looking down 

Into a gulf of azure calm ; the rack 

Seethed round about, tempestuously black ; 

But the god's eye could hold its angry thunders back. 

There lay the world, down through the chasmed blue, 

Stretched out from edge to edge unto his view ; 

And in the midst, bright as a summer's day 

At breathless noon, the Mediterranean lay ; 

And Ocean round the world's dim fringes tossed 

His glaucous waves in mist and distance lost ; 

And Pontus and the livid Caspian Sea 

Stirred in their nightmare sleep uneasily. 

And 'twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land, 

Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand, 

And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow 

And the white, changeless silences of snow ; 

While here and there towns, like a living eye 

Unclosed on earth's bhnd face, towards the sky 

Glanced their bright conscious beauty. Yet the sight 



Leda 

Of his fair earth gave him but small delight 

Now in his restlessness : its beauty could 

Do nought to quench the fever in his blood. 

Desire lends sharpness to his searching eyes ; 

Over the world his focused passion flies 

Quicker than chasing sunlight on a day 

Of storm and golden April. Far away 

He sees the tranquil rivers of the East, 

Mirrors of many a strange barbaric feast, 

Where un-Hellenic dancing-girls contort 

Their yellow limbs, and gibbering masks make sport 

Under the moons of many-coloured light 

That swing their lantern-fruitage in the night 

Of overarching trees. To him it seems 

An alien world, peopled by insane dreams. 

But these are nothing to the monstrous shapes — 

Not men so much as bastardy of apes — 

That meet his eyes in Africa. Between 

Leaves of grey fungoid pulp and poisonous green, 

White eyes from black and browless faces stare. 

Dryads with star-flowers in their woolly hair 

Dance to the flaccid clapping of their own 

Black dangling dugs through forests overgrown, 

Platted with writhing creepers. Horrified, 

He sees them how they leap and dance, or glide, 

Glimpse after black glimpse of a satin skin. 

Among unthinkable flowers, to pause and grin 

Out through a trellis of suppurating lips. 

Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips 

And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes 

Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes 

Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh . . . 

He turns 
Northward his sickened sight. The desert burns 



8 Leda 

All life away. Here in the forked shade 
Of twin-humped towering dromedaries laid, 
A few gaunt folk are sleeping : fierce they seem 
Even in sleep, and restless as they dream. 
He would be fearful of a desert bride 
As of a brown asp at his sleeping side. 
Fearful of her white teeth and cunning arts. 
Further, yet further, to the ultimate parts 
Of the wide earth he looks, where Britons go 
Painted among their swamps, and through the snow 
Huge hairy snuffling beasts pursue their prey — 
Fierce men, as hairy and as huge as they. 

Bewildered furrows deepen the Thunderer's scowl ; 
This world so vast, so variously foul — 
I Who can have made its ugliness f In what 
/ Revolting fancy were the Forms begot 
' Of all these monsters ? What strange deity — 
So barbarously not a Greek ! — was he 
Who could mismake such beings in his own 
V Distorted image. Nay, the Greeks alone 
Were men ; in Greece alone were bodies fair, 
Minds comely. In that all-but-island there, 
Cleaving the blue sea with its promontories, 
Lies the world's hope, the seed of all the glories 
That are to be ; there, too, must surely live 
She who alone can medicinably give 
Ease with her beauty to the Thunderer's pain. 
Downwards he bends his fiery eyes again. 
Glaring on Hellas. Like a beam of light. 
His intent glances touch the mountain height 
With passing flame and probe the valleys deep. 
Rift the dense forest and the age-old sleep 
Of vaulted antres on whose pebbly floor 



Leda 

Gallop the loud-hoofed Centaurs ; and the roar 

Of more than human shouting underground 

Pulses in living palpable waves of sound 

From wall to wall, until it rumbles out 

Into the air ; and at that hollow shout 

That seems an utterance of the whole vast hill, 

The shepherds cease their laughter and are still. 

Cities asleep under the noonday sky 

Stir at the passage of his burning eye ; 

And in their huts the startled peasants blink 

At the swift flash that bursts through every chink 

Of wattled walls, hearkening in fearful wonder 

Through lengthened seconds for the crash of thunder — 

Which follows not : they are the more afraid. 

Jove seeks amain. Many a country maid, 

Whose sandalled feet pass down familiar ways 

Among the olives, but whose spirit strays 

Through lovelier lands of fancy, suddenly 

Starts broad awake out of her dream to see 

A light that is not of the sun, a light 

Darted by living eyes, consciously bright ; 

She sees and feels it like a subtle flame 

Mantling her limbs with fear and maiden shame 

And strange desire. Longing and terrified, 

She hides her face, like a new-wedded bride 

Who feels rough hands that seize and hold her fast ; 

And swooning falls. The terrible light has passed ; 

She wakes ; the sun still shines, the olive trees 

Tremble to whispering silver in the breeze 

And all is as it was, save she alone 

In whose dazed eyes this deathless light has shone : 

For never, never from this day forth will she 

In earth's poor passion find felicity. 

Or love of mortal man. A god's desire 



I o Leda 

Has seared her soul ; nought but the same strong fire 
Can kindle the dead ash to life again, 
And all her years will be a lonely pain. 

Many a thousand had he looked upon, 

Thousands of mortals, young and old ; but none — 

Virgin, or young ephebus, or the flower 

Of womanhood culled in its full-blown hour — 

Could please the Thunderer's sight or touch his mind ; 

The longed-for loveliness was yet to find. 

Had beauty fled, and was there nothing fair 

Under the moon ? The fury of despair 

Raged in the breast of heaven's Almighty Lord ; 

He gnashed his foamy teeth and rolled and roared 

In bull-like agony. Then a great calm 

Descended on him : cool and healing balm 

Touched his immortal fury. He had spied 

Young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. 

Even as she broke the river's smooth expanse, 

Leda was conscious of that hungry glance. 

And knew it for an eye of fearful power 

That did so hot and thunderously lour, 

She knew not whence, on her frail nakedness. 

Jove's heart held but one thought : he must possess 

That perfect form or die — possess or die. 

Unheeded prayers and supplications fly. 

Thick as a flock of birds, about his ears, 

And smoke of incense rises ; but he hears 

Nought but the soft falls of that melody 

Which is the speech of Leda ; he can see 

Nought but that almost spiritual grace 

Which is her body, and that heavenly face 

Where gay, sweet thoughts shine through, and eyes are bright 



Leda i i 

With purity and the soul's inward light. 

Have her he must : the teasel-fingered burr 

Sticks not so fast in a wild beast's tangled fur 

As that insistent longing in the soul 

Of mighty Jove. Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole 

Vast universe was blotted from his thought 

And nought remained but Leda's laughter, nought 

But Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust. 

She was the whole world now ; have her he must, he must . . . 

His spirit worked ; how should he gain his end 

With most deliciousness ? What better friend, 

What counsellor more subtle could he find 

Than lovely Aphrodite, ever kind 

To hapless lovers, ever cunning, too, 

In all the tortuous ways of love to do 

And plan the best ? To Paphos then ! His will 

And act were one ; and straight, invisible. 

He stood in Paphos, breathing the languid air 

By Aphrodite's couch. O heavenly fair 

She was, and smooth and marvellously young ! 

On Tyrian silk she lay, and purple hung 

About her bed in folds of fluted light 

And shadow, dark as wine. Two doves, more white 

Even than the white hand on the purple lying 

Like a pale flower wearily dropped, were flying 

With wings that made an odoriferous stir. 

Dropping faint dews of bakkaris and myrrh, 

Musk and the soul of sweet flowers cunningly 

Ravished from transient petals as they die. 

Two stripling cupids on her either hand 

Stood near with winnowing plumes and gently fanned 

Her hot, love-fevered cheeks and eyelids burning. 

Another, crouched at the bed's foot, was turning 

A mass of scattered parchments — vows or plaints 



I 2 Leda 

Or glad triumphant thanks which Venus' saints, 

Martyrs and heroes, on her altars strewed 

With bitterest tears or gifts of gratitude. 

From the pile heaped at Aphrodite's feet 

The boy would take a leaf, and in his sweet, 

Clear voice would read what mortal tongues can tell 

In stammering verse of those ineffable 

Pleasures and pains of love, heaven and uttermost hell. 

Jove hidden stood and heard him read these lines 

Of votive thanks — 

Cypris, this little silver lamp to thee 
I dedicate. 

It was my fellow-watcher, shared with me 

Those swift, short hours, when raised above my fate 

In Sphenura's white arms I drank 
Of immortality. 
" A pretty lamp, and I will have it placed 
Beside the narrow bed of some too chaste 
Sister of virgin Artemis, to be 
A night-long witness of her cruelty. 
Read me another, boy," and Venus bent 
Her ear to listen to this short lament. 

Cypris, Cypris, I am betrayed ! 

Under the same wide mantle laid 

I found them, faithless, shameless pair ! 

Making love with tangled hair. 
" Alas," the goddess cried, " nor god, nor man, 
Nor medicinable balm, nor magic can 
Cast out the demon jealousy, whose breath 
Withers the rose of life, save only time and death." 
Another sheet he took and read again. 

Farewell to love, and hail the long, slow pain 

Of memory that backward turns to joy. 

O I have danced enough and enough sung ; 



, Leda i 3 

My teet shall be still now and my voice mute ; 

Thine are these withered wreaths, this Lydian flute, 
Cypris ; I once was young. 
And pietous Aphrodite wept to think 
How fadingly upon death's very brink 
Beauty and love take hands for one short kiss — 
And then the wreaths are dust, the bright-eyed bliss 
Perished, and the flute still. " Read on, read on." 
But ere the page could start, a lightning shone 
Suddenly through the room, and they were 'ware 
Of some great terrible presence looming there. 
And it took shape — huge limbs, whose every line 
A symbol was of power and strength divine, 
And it was Jove. 

" Daughter, I come," said he, 
" For counsel in a case that touches me 
Close, to the very life." And he straightway 
Told her of all his restlessness that day 
And of his sight of Leda, and how great 
Was his desire. And so in close debate 
Sat the two gods, planning their rape ; while she. 
Who was to be their victim, joyously 
Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill 
And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill 
And every fear and all, save only this : 
That she was young, and it was perfect bliss 
To be alive where suns so goldenly shine, 
And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine. 
And the cicadas sing from morn till night. 
And rivers run so cool and pure and bright . . . 
Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay 
In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away 
The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine 
As those old images of the gods that shine 



H 



Leda 

With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years 

By the touching lips of countless worshippers, 

Her body was ; and the sun's golden heat 

Clothed her in softest fiame from head to feet 

And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew 

The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue, 

Far hills and the faint fringes of the sky 

Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily, 

And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill 

Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until 

A listener might wonder if they cried 

In his own head or in the world outside. 

Sometimes she shut her eyelids, and wrapped round 

In a red darkness, with the mufHed sound 

And throb of blood beating within her brain. 

Savoured intensely to the verge of pain 

Her own young life, hoarded it up behind 

Her shuttered lids, until, too long confined, 

It burst them open and her prisoned soul 

Flew forth and took possession of the whole 

Exquisite world about her and was made 

A part of it. Meanwhile her maidens played, 

Singing an ancient song of death and birth. 

Seed-time and harvest, old as the grey earth. 

And moving to their music in a dance 

As immemorial. A numbing trance 

Came gradually over her, as though 

Flake after downy-feathered flake of snow 

Had muffled all her senses, drifting deep 

And warm and quiet. 

From this ail-but sleep 
She started into life again ; the sky 
Was full of a strange tumult suddenly — 



Leda 1 5 

Beating of mighty wings and shrill-voiced fear 

And the hoarse scream of rapine following near. 

In the high windlessness above her flew, 

Dazzlingly white on the untroubled blue, 

A splendid swan, with outstretched neck and wing 

Spread fathom wide, and closely following 

An eagle, tawny and black. This god-like pair 

Circled and swooped through the calm of upper air, 

The eagle striking and the white swan still 

'Scaping as though by happy miracle 

The imminent talons. For the twentieth time 

The furious hunter stooped, to miss and climb 

A mounting spiral into the height again. 

He hung there poised, eyeing the grassy plain 

Far, far beneath, where the girls' upturned faces 

Were like white flowers that bloom in open places 

Among the scarcely budded woods. And they 

Breathlessly watched and waited ; long he lay, 

Becalmed upon that tideless sea of light, 

While the great swan with slow and creaking flight 

Went slanting down towards safety, where the stream 

Shines through the trees below, with glance and gleam 

Of blue aerial eyes that seem to give 

Sense to the sightless earth and make it live. 

The ponderous wings beat on and no pursuit : 

Stiff as the painted kite that guards the fruit. 

Afloat o'er orchards ripe, the eagle yet 

Hung as at anchor, seeming to forget 

His uncaught prey, his rage unsatisfied. 

Still, quiet, dead . . . and then the quickest-eyed 

Had lost him. Like a star unsphered, a stone 

Dropped from the vault of heaven, a javelin thrown, 

He swooped upon his prey. Down, down he came. 

And through his plumes with a noise of wind-blown flame 



I 6 Leda 

Loud roared the air. From Leda's lips a cry 

Broke, and she hid her face — she could not see him die, 

Her lovely, hapless swan. 

Ah, had she heard. 
Even as the eagle hurtled past, the word 
That treacherous pair exchanged. " Peace," cried the swan 
*' Peace, daughter. All my strength will soon be gone. 
Wasted in tedious flying, ere I come 
Where my desire hath set its only home." 
" Go," said the eagle, " I have played my part, 
Roused pity for your plight in Leda's heart 
(Pity the mother of voluptuousness). 
Go, father Jove ; be happy ; for success 
Attends this moment." 

On the queen's numbed sense 
Fell a glad shout that ended sick suspense, 
Bidding her lift once more towards the light 
Her eyes, by pity closed against a sight 
Of blood and death — ^her eyes, how happy now 
To see the swan still safe, while far below, 
Brought by the force of his eluded stroke 
So near to earth that with his wings he woke 
A gust whose sudden silvery motion stirred 
The meadow grass, struggled the sombre bird 
Of rage and rapine. Loud his scream and hoarse 
With baffled fury as he urged his course 
Upwards again on threshing pinions wide. 
But the fair swan, not daring to abide 
This last assault, dropped with the speed of fear 
Towards the river. Like a winged spear, 
Outstretching his long neck, rigid and straight. 
Aimed at where Leda on the bank did wait 
With open arms and kind, uplifted eyes 
And voice of tender pity, down he flies. 



Leda 

Nearer, nearer, terribly swift, he sped 

Directly at the queen ; then widely spread 

Resisting wings, and breaking his descent 

'Gainst his own wind, all speed and fury spent, 

The great swan fluttered slowly down to rest 

And sweet security on Leda's breast. 

Menacingly the eagle wheeled above her ; 

But Leda, like a noble-hearted lover 

Keeping his child-beloved from tyrannous harm. 

Stood o'er the swan and, with one slender arm 

Imperiously lifted, waved away 

The savage foe, still hungry for his prey. 

Baffled at last, he mounted out of sight 

And the sky was void — save for a single white 

Swan's feather moulted from a harassed wing 

That down, down, with a rhythmic balancing 

From side to side dropped sleeping on the air. 

Down, slowly down over that dazzling pair, 

Whose different grace in union was a birth 

Of unimagined beauty on the earth : 

So lovely that the maidens standing round 

Dared scarcely look. Couched on the flowery ground 

Young Leda lay, and to her side did press 

The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness, 

Stroking the snow-soft plumage of his breast 

With fingers slowly drawn, themselves caressed 

By the warm softness where they lingered, loth 

To break away. Sometimes against their growth 

Ruffling the feathers inlaid like little scales 

On his sleek neck, the pointed finger-nails 

Rasped on the warm, dry, puckered skin beneath ; 

And feeling it she shuddered, and her teeth 

Grated on edge ; for there was something strange 

And snake-like in the touch. He, in exchange, 



17 



1 8 Leda 

Gave back to her, stretching his eager neck, 

For every kiss a Httle amorous peck ; 

Rubbing his silver head on her gold tresses, 

And with the nip of horny dry caresses 

Leaving upon her young white breast and cheek 

And arms the red print of his playful beak. 

Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim 

Austerity of virginal flank and limb 

His curved and florid beauty, till she felt 

That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt 

The bones and marrow of her strength away. 

One lifted arm bent o'er her brow, she lay 

With limbs relaxed, scarce breathing, deathly still ; 

Save when a quick, involuntary thrill 

Shook her sometimes with passing shudderings. 

As though some hand had plucked the aching strings 

Of life itself, tense with expectancy. 

And over her the swan shook slowly free 

The folded glory of his wings, and made 

A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade 

To be her veil and keep her from the shame 

Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame. 

Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky. 
Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry 
Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain. 
Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again. 



The Birth of God 19 



THE BIRTH OF GOD 

NIGHT is a void about me ; I lie alone ; 
And water drips, like an idiot clicking his tongue, 
Senselessly, ceaselessly, endlessly drips 
Into the waiting silence, grown 
Emptier for this small inhuman sound. 
My love is gone, my love who is tender and young. 

smooth warm body ! O passionate lips ! 

1 have stretched forth hands in the dark and nothing found : 
The silence is huge as the sky — I lie alone — 

My narrow room, a darkness that knows no bound. 

How shall I fill this measureless 
Deep void that the taking away 
Of a child's slim beauty has made ? 
Slender she is and small, but the loneliness 
She has left is a night no stars allay, 
And I am cold and afraid. 

Long, long ago, cut off from the wolfish pack, 

From the warm, immediate touch of friends and mate. 

Lost and alone, alone in the utter black 

Of a forest night, some far-off, beast-like man. 

Cowed by the cold indifferent hate 

Of the northern silence, crouched in fear, 

When through his bleared and suffering mind 



20 Leda 

A sudden tremor of comfort ran, 

And the void was filled by a rushing wind, 

And he breathed a sense of something friendly and near, 

And in privation the life of God began. 

Love, from your loss shall a god be born to fill 

The emptiness, where once you were, 

With friendly knowledge and more than a lover's will 

To ease despair ? 

Shall I feed longing with what it hungers after, 

Seeing in earth and sea and air 

A lover's smiles, hearing a lover's laughter, 

Feeling love everywhere ? 

The night drags on. Darkness and silence grow, 
And with them my desire has grown, 
My bitter need. Alas, I know, 
I know that here I lie alone. 



On Hampstead Heath 21 



ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH 

BENEATH the sunlight and blue of ail-but Autumn 
The grass sleeps goldenly ; woodland and distant hill 
Shine through the gauzy air in a dust of golden pollen, 
And even the glittering leaves are almost still. 

Scattered on the grass, like a ragman's bundles carelessly dropped, 
Men sleep outstretched or, sprawling, bask in the sun ; 

Here glows a woman's bright dress and here a child is sitting, 
And I lie down and am one of the sleepers, one 

Like the rest of this tumbled crowd. Do they all, I wonder, 
Feel anguish grow with the calm day's slow decline, 

Longing, as I, for a shattering wind, a passion 
Of bodily pain to be the soul's anodyne ? 



2 2 Leda 



SYMPATHY 

THE irony of being two . . . ! 
Grey eyes, wide open suddenly, 
Regard me and enquire ; I see a face 
Grave and unquiet in tenderness. 
Heart-rending question of women — never answered 
" Tell me, tell me, what are you thinking of r " 
Oh, the pain and fooHshness of love ! 
What can I do but make my old grimace, 
Ending it with a kiss, as I always do ? 



Male and Female Created He Them 23 



MALE AND FEMALE CREATED 
HE THEM 

DIAPHENIA, drunk with sleep, 
Drunk with pleasure, drunk with fatigue, 
Feels her Corydon's fingers creep — 
Ring-finger, middle finger, index, thumb — 
Strummingly over the smooth sleek drum 
Of her thorax. 

Meanwhile Handel's Gigue 
Turns in Corydon's absent mind 
To Yakka-Hoola. 

She can find 
No difference in the thrilling touch 
Of one who, now, in everything 
Is God-like. " Was there ever such 
Passion as ours ? " 

His pianoing 
Gives place to simple arithmetic's 
Simplest constatations : — six 
Letters in Gneiss and three in Gnu : 
Luncheon to-day cost three and two ; 
In a year — ^he couldn't calculate 
Three- sixty-five times thirty-eight, 
Figuring with printless fingers on 
Her living parchment. 

" Corydon ! 
I faint, faint, faint at your dear touch. 
Say, is it possible ... to love too much f " 



24 Leda 



FROM THE PILLAR 

SIMEON, the withered stylite, 
Sat gloomily looking down 
Upon each roof and skylight 
In all the seething town. 

And in every upper chamber, 

On roofs, where the orange flowers 

Make weary men remember 

The perfume of long-dead hours. 

He saw the wine-drenched riot 
Of harlots and human beasts, 

And how celestial quiet 

Was shattered by their feasts. 

The steam of fetid vices 
From a thousand lupanars. 

Like smoke of sacrifices, 

Reeked up to the heedless stars. 

And the saint from his high fastness 

Of purity apart 
Cursed them and their unchasteness. 

And envied them in his heart. 



Jonah 



25 



JONAH 

A CREAM of phosphorescent light 
Floats on the wash that to and fro 
Slides round his feet — enough to show 
Many a pendulous stalactite 
Of naked mucus, whorls and wreaths 
And huge festoons of mottled tripes 
And smaller palpitating pipes 
Through which a yeasty liquor seethes. 

Seated upon the convex mound 

Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays 

And sings his canticles and hymns, 

Making the hollow vault resound 

God's goodness and mysterious ways. 

Till the great fish spouts music as he swims. 



26 Leda 



VARIATIONS ON A THEME 

SWAN, Swan, 
Yesterday you were 
The whitest of things in this dark winter. 
To-day the snow has made of your plumes 
An unwashed pocket handkercher, 
An unwashed pocket handkercher . . . 
" Lancashire, to Lancashire ! " — 
Tune of the antique trains long ago : 
Each summer holiday a milestone 
Backwards, backwards : — 
Tenby, Barmouth, and year by year 
All the different hues of the sea, 
Blue, green and blue. 
But on this river of muddy jade 
There swims a yellow swan, 
And along the bank the snow lies dazlingly white. 



A Melody by Scarlatti 27 



A MELODY BY SCARLATTI 

HOW clear under the trees, 
How softly the music flows, 
Rippling from one still pool to another 
Into the lake of silence. 



2 8 Leda 



A SUNSET 

OVER against the triumph and the close — 
Amber and green and rose — 
Of this short day, 
The pale ghost of the moon grows living-bright 
Once more, as the last light 
Ebbs slowly away. 
Darkening the fringes of these western glories 
The black phantasmagories 
Of cloud advance 
With noiseless footing — vague and villainous shapes, 
Wrapped in their ragged fustian capes, 
Of some grotesque romance. 
But overhead where, like a pool between 
Dark rocks, the sky is green 
And clear and deep, 
Floats windlessly a cloud, with curving breast 
Flushed by the fiery west, 
In god-like sleep . . . 
And in my mind opens a sudden door 
That lets me see once more 
A little room 
With night beyond the window, chill and damp, 
And one green-lighted lamp 
Tempering the gloom. 
While here within, close to me, touching me 
(Even the memory 
Of my desire 



A Sunset 29 



Shakes me like fear), you sit with scattered hair ; 
And all your body bare 
Before the fire 
Is lapped about with rosy fiame .... But still, 
Here on the lonely hill, 
I walk alone ; 
Silvery green is the moon's lamp overhead, 
The cloud sleeps warm and red. 
And you are gone. 



30 



Leda 



LIFE AND ART 

YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure ; 
You laugh with the bountiful earth 
In its richness of summer treasure : 

Where now are your flowers and your mirth ? 
Petals and cadenced laughter, 

Each in a dying fall, 
, Droop out of life ; and after 
\ Is nothing ; they were all. 

But we from the death of roses 

That three suns perfume and gild 
With a kiss, till the fourth discloses 

A withered wreath, have distilled 
The fulness of one rare phial, 

Whose nimble life shall outrun 
The circling shadow on the dial. 

Outlast the tyrannous sun. 



First Philosopher's Song 31 



FIRST PHILOSOPHER'S SONG 

A POOR degenerate from the ape, 
Whose hands are four, whose tail's a Hmb, 
I contemplate my flaccid shape 
And know I may not rival him, 

Save with my mind — a nimbler beast 
Possessing a thousand sinewy tails, 
A thousand hands, with which it scales. 
Greedy of luscious truth, the greased 

Poles and the coco palms of thought, 
Thrids easily through the mangrove maze 
Of metaphysics, walks the taut 
Frail dangerous liana ways 

That link across wide gulfs remote 
Analogies between tree and tree ; 
Outruns the hare, outhops the goat ; 
Mind fabulous, mind sublime and free ! 

But oh, the sound of simian mirth ! 
Mind, issued from the monkey's womb, 
Is still umbilical to earth, 
Earth its home and earth its tomb. 



32 Led 



a 



SECOND PHILOSOPHER'S SONG 

IF, O my Lesbia, I should commit, 
Not fornication, dear, but suicide, 
My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it) 
Would drift face upwards on the oily tide 
With the other garbage, till it putrefied. 

But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts 
Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown — 
Your maiden modesty would float face down, 
And men would weep upon your hinder parts. 

'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan 
By which this best of worlds is wisely planned. 
One law He made for woman, one for man : 
We bow the head and do not understand. 



Fifth Philosopher's Song 33 



FIFTH PHILOSOPHER'S SONG 

A MILLION million spermatozoa, 
All of them alive : 
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah 
Dare hope to survive. 

And among that billion minus one 

Might have chanced to be 
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne — 

But the One was Me. 

Shame to have ousted your betters thus, 

Taking ark while the others remained outside ! 

Better for all of us, froward Homunculus, 
If you'd quietly died ! 



3 4 Leda 



V 



NINTH PHILOSOPHER'S SONG 

G 



OD'S in His Heaven : He never issues 
(Wise Man !) to visit this world of ours. 
I nchccked the cancer gnaws our tissues. 
Stops to lick cliops and then again devours. 



Those find, who most delight to roam 

'Mid castles of remotest Spain, 
That there's, thank Heaven, no place like home ; 

So they set out upon their travels again. 

Hoautv for some provides escape. 

Who gain a luippiness in e)-eing 
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape 

Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dnng. 

And some to better worlds than this 
Mount up on wings as frail and misty 

As passion's all-too-transient kiss 

(Though afterwards — oh, cm«/ animal trist:' !) 

But 1. too rational by lialf 

To live but where I boviily am. 
Can only do my best to laugh. 

Can only sip my misery dram by dram. 



Ninth Philosopher's Song 35 

While happier mortals take to drink, 

A dolorous dipsomaniac. 
Fuddled with grief I sit and think. 

Looking upon the bile when it is black. 

Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor ! 

We'll pledge our Empire vast across the flood : 
For Blood, as all men know, than Water's thicker, 

But water's wider, thank the Lord, than Blood. 



3 6 Leda 



MORNING SCENE 

LIGHT through the latticed blind 
Spans the dim intermediate space 
With parallels of luminous dust 
To gild a nuptial couch, where Goya's mind 
Conceived those agonising hands, that hair 
Scattered, and half a sunlit bosom bare, 
And, imminently above them, a red face 
Fixed in the imbecile earnestness of lust. 



Verrey's 37 



VERREY'S 

HERE, every winter's night at eight, 
Epicurus lies in state, 
Two candles at his head and two 
Candles at his feet. A few 
Choice spirits watch beneath the vault 
Of his dim chapel, where default 
Of music fills the pregnant air 
With subtler requiem and prayer 
Than ever an organ wrought with notes 
Spouted from its tubal throats. 
Black Ethiopia's Holy Child, 
The Cradled Bottle, breathes its mild 
Meek spirit on the ravished nose, 
The palate and the tongue of those 
Who piously partake with me 
Of this funereal agape. 



3 8 Leda 



FRASCATI'S 

BUBBLE-BREASTED swells the dome 
Of this my spiritual home. 
From whose nave the chandelier. 
Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer. 
We in the round balcony sit, 
Lean o'er and look into the pit 
Where feed the human bears beneath. 
Champing with their gilded teeth. 
What negroid holiday makes free 
With such priapic reveky ? 

What songs ? What gongs .? What nameless rites ? 
\Miat gods like wooden stalagmites ? 
What steam of blood or kidney pie ? 
What blasts of Bantu melody ? 
Ragtime. . . . But when the wearied Band 
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand. 
And there we sit in blissful calm. 
Quietly sweating palm to palm. 



Fatigue 39 



FATIGUE 

THE mind has lost its Aristotelian elegance of shape : there is 
only a darkness where bubbles and inconsequent balloons 
float up to burst their luminous cheeks and vanish. 

A woman with a basket on her head : a Chinese lantern quite 
askew : the vague bright bulging of chemists' window bottles ; and 
then in my ears the distant noise of a great river of people. And 
phrases, phrases — 

It is only a question of saddle-bags, 

Stane Street and Gondibert, 

Foals in Iceland (or was it Foals in aspic ?). 

As that small reddish devil turns away with an insolent jut of his 
hindquarters, I become aware that his curling pug's tail is an electric 
bell-push. But that does not disquiet me so much as the sight of all 
these polished statues twinkling with high lights and all of them 
grotesque and all of them colossal. 



40 Leda 



THE MERRY-GO-ROUND 

THE machine is ready to start. The symboHc beasts grow resty, 
curveting where they stand at their places in the great blue 
circle of the year. The Showman's voice rings out. " Montez, 
mesdames et messieurs, montez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram. 
You will take the Scorpion. Yours, madame, is the Goat. As for 
you there, blackguard boy, you must be content wdth the Fishes. I 
have allotted you the Virgin, mademoiselle." ..." Polisson ! " 
" Pardon, pardon. Evidcmment, c'est le Sagittaire qu'on demande. 
Ohe, les dards ! The rest must take what comes. The Twins shall 
counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away we go, 
away." 

Ha, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, 
drink in the intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells 
and rings. . . . sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every 
rooted star ; sound of winds and seas and all the simmering millions 
of life. Moving, singing ... so with a roar and a rush round we go 
and round, for ever whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken 
life and speed. 

But I happened to look inwards among the machyiery of our 
roundabout, and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel 
and sweating as he ground, and grinding eternally. And when I 
perceived that he was the author of all our speed and that the music 
was of his making, that everything depended on his grinding wheel, I 
thought I would like to get off. But we were going too fast. 



Back Streets 41 



BACK STREETS 

BACK streets, gutters of stagnating darkness where men breath 
something that is not so much air as a kind of rarefied sHme. 
... I look back down the tunnelled darkness of a drain to where, at 
the mouth, a broader, windier water-way glitters with the gay speed 
and motion of sunlit life. But around all is dimly rotting ; and the 
inhabitants are those squamous, phosphorescent creatures that dark- 
ness and decay beget. Little men, sheathed tightly in clothes of an 
exaggeratedly fashionable cheapness, hurry along the pavements, 
jaunty and at the same time furtive. There is a thin layer of slime 
over all of them. And then there are the eyes of the women, with 
their hard glitter that is only of the surface. They see acutely, but 
in a glassy, superficial way, taking in the objects round them no 
more than my western windows retain the imprint of the sunset 
that enriches them. 

Back streets, exhalations of a difficulty puberty, I once lived on 
the fringes of them. 



42 Leda 



LAST THINGS 

THERE have been visions, dark in the minds of men, death and 
corruption dancing across the secular abyss that separates 
eternity from time to where sits the ineluctable judge, waiting, wait- 
ing through the ages, and ponders all his predestinated decrees. 
There will be judgment, and each, in an agony of shame, reluctant 
yet compelled, will turn his own accuser. For 

Tunc tua gesta noxia 
Secreta quoque turpia 
Videbunt mille millia 
Virorum circumstantia. 

There under the unwinking gaze of all the legions of just men 
made perfect, the poor prisoner will uncover each dirty secret of his 
heart, will act over again each shameful scene of his life. And those 
eyes of saints and angels will shine impassively down upon his 
beastliness, and to him, as he looks at their steady brilliance, they will 
seem a million of little blazing loopholes slotted in the walls of hell. 

Hildebert, this was your vision as you brooded over death and 
judgment, hell and heaven, in your cloister, a thousand years ago. 
Do you not envy us our peace of mind who know not four ultimates, 
but only one ? For whom the lirst of the Last Things is also the last 
— us, whom death annihilates with all our shame and all our folly, 
leaving no trace behind. 



Gothic 43 



GOTHIC 

SHARP spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling 
bells. Reckless, breakneck, head over heels down an airy 
spiral of stairs run the bells. " Upon Paul's steeple stands a tree." 

Up again and then once more to the bottom, two steps at a time. 
" As full of apples as can be." 

Up again and down again : centuries of climbing have not worn 
the crystal smoothness of the degrees. 

Along the bellying clouds the little boys of London Town come 
running, running as best they may, seeing that at every step they sink 
ankle-deep through the woolly surface into the black heart of thunder 
beneath. 

The apples on the trees are swaying in the wind, rocking to the 
clamour of bells. The leaves are of bright green copper, and rattle 
together with a scaly sound. At the roots of the tree sit four gargoyles 
playing a little serious game with dice. The hunch-backed ape has 
won from the manticore that crooked French crown with a hole in it 
which the manticore got from the friar with the strawberry nose ; he 
had it in turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed 
legs down there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, 
where the great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and 
stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas. 



44 



r.eda 



EVENING PARTY 

*' O ANS Espoir, sans Espoir ..." sang the lady while the piano 
w]3 laboriously opened its box of old sardines in treacle. One 
detected ptomaine in the syrup. 

Sans Espoir ... I thought of the rhymes — soir, nonchaloir, 
reposoir — the dying falls of a symbolism grown sadly suicidal before 
the broad Flemish back of the singer, the dewlaps of her audience. 
Sans Espoir. The listeners wore the frozen rapture of those who 
gaze upon the uplifted Host. 

Catching one another's eye, we had a simultaneous vision of pews, 
of hyenas and hysteria. 

Three candles were burning. They behaved like English aristo- 
crats in a French novel — perfectly, impassively. I tried to imitate 
their milordliness. 

One of the candles flickered, snickered. Was it a draught or was 
it laughter ? 

Flickering, snickering — candles, you betrayed me. I had to 
laugh too. 



Beauty 45 



BEAUTY 



THERE is a sea somewhere — whether in the lampless crypts of the 
earth, or among sunlit islands, or that which is an unfathom- 
able and terrifying question between the archipelagos of stars — there 
is a sea (and perhaps its tides have filled those green transparent pools 
that glint like eyes in a spring storm-cloud) which is for ever troubled 
and in travail — a bubbling and a heaving up of waters as though for 
the birth of a fountain. 

The sick and the crippled lie along the brims in expectation of 
the miracle. And at last, at last . . . 

A funnel of white water is twisted up and so stands, straight and 
still by the very speed of its motion. 

It drinks the light ; slowly it is infused with colour, rose and 
mother-of-pearl. Slowly it takes shape, a heavenly body. 

O dazzling Anadyomene ! 

The flakes of foam break into white birds about her head, fall 
again in a soft avalanche of flowers. Perpetual miracle, beauty 
endlessly born. 



46 Leda 



II 

STEAMERS, in all your travelling have you trailed the meshes of 
your long expiring white nets across this sea, or dipped in it your 
sliding rail, or balanced your shadow far far down upon its glass-green 
sand ? Or, forgetting the preoccupations of commerce and the well- 
oiled predestination of your machinery, did you ever put in at the real 
Paphos ? 



Beauty 47 



III 

IN the city of Troy, whither our Argonautical voyages had carried us, 
we found Helen and that lamentable Cressid who was to Chaucer 
the feminine paradox, untenably fantastic but so devastatingly actual, 
the crystal ideal — flawed ; and to Shakespeare the inevitable trull, 
flayed to show her physiological machinery and the logical conclusion 
of every the most heartrendingly ingenuous gesture of maidenhood. 
(But, bless you ! our gorge doesn't rise. We are cynically well up 
in the damning Theory of woman, which makes it all the more amusing 
to watch ourselves in the ecstatic practice of her. Unforeseen 
perversity.) 

Fabulous Helen ! At her firm breasts they used to mould delicate 
drinking cups which made the sourest vinegar richly poisonous. 

The geometry of her body had utterly outwitted Euclid, and the 
Philosophers were baffled by curves of a subtlety infinitely more elusive 
and Eleusinian than the most oracular speculations of Parmenides. 
They did their best to make a coherent system out of the incompatible, 
but empirically established, facts of her. Time, for instance, was 
abolished within the circle of her arms. " It is eternity when her lips 
touch me," Paris had remarked. And yet this same Paris was mani- 
festly and notoriously falling into a decline, had lost whatever sense 
or beauty he once possessed, together with his memory and all skill 
in the nine arts which are memory's daughters. How was it then, 
these perplexed philosophers wondered, that she could at one and the 
same moment give eternity like a goddess, while she was vampiring 
away with that divine thirsty mouth of hers the last dregs of a poor 
mortal Hfe .? They sought an insufficient refuge in Heraclitus' theory 
of opposites. 



48 Leda 

Meanwhile Troilus was always to be found at sunset, pacing up 
and down the walls by the western gate — quite mad. At dusk the 
Greek camp-fires would blossom along Xanthus banks — one after 
another, a myriad lights dancing in the dark. 

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, 

O'er heaven's pure azure spreads her something light. 

He would repeat the simile to himself, but could never remember 
the correct epithets. Not that they mattered — any more than 
anything else. 



Beauty 49 



IV 

THERE are fine cities in the world — Manhattan, Ecbatana and 
Hecatompylus — but this city of Troy is the most fabulous of 
them all. Rome was seven hills of butcher's meat, Athens an abstraction 
of marble, in Alexandria the steam of kidney-puddings revolted the 
coenobites, darkness and size render London inappreciable, Paris is 
full of sparrows, the snow lies gritty on BerHn, Moscow has no veri- 
similitude, all the East is peopled by masks and apes and larvae. But 
this city of Troy is most of all real and fabulous with its charnel 
beauty. 

" Is not Helen the end of our search — paradisal little World, symbol 
and epitome of the Great ? Dawn sleeps in the transparent shadow 
of roses within her ear. The stainless candour of infinity — far-off 
peaks in summer and the Milky Way — ^has taken marvellous form in 
her. The Little World has its meteors, too, comets and shadowy 
clouds of hair, stars at whose glance men go planet-struck. Meteors 
— yes, and history it has. The past is still alive in the fragrance of her 
hair, and her young body breathes forth memories as old as the 
beginning of life — Eros first of gods. In her is the goal. I rest here 
with Helen." 

" Fool," I said, " quote your Faustus. I go further." 



50 Leda 



V 

FURTHER — but a hundred Liliputian tethers prevent me, the 
white nerves which tie soul to skin. And the whole air is 
aching with epidermical magnetism. 

Further, further. But Troy is the birthplace of my home- 
sickness. Troy is more than a patriotism, for it is built of my very 
flesh ; the remembrance of it is a fire that sticks and tears when I 
would pull it off. 

But further. One last look at Troilus where he stands by the 
western gate, staring over the plain. Further. When I have learnt 
the truth, I will return and build a new palace with domes less 
ominously like breasts, and there I will invent a safer Helen and a less 
paradoxical Cressid, and my harem will be a library for enlighten- 
ment. 



Beauty 51 



VI 

HERE are pagodas of diminishing bells. The leopard sleeps in 
the depth of his rosy cavern, and when he breathes it is a 
smell of irresistible sweetness ; in the bestiaries he is the symbol of 
Christ in His sepulchre. 

This listening conch has collected all the rumours of pantheism ; 
the dew in this veined cup is the sacrament of nature, while these pale 
thuribles worship in the dark with yellow lamps and incense. 

Everywhere alchemical profusion — ^the golden mintage of glades 
and ripples, vigils of passion enriched with silver under the fingers of 
the moon ; everywhere lavishness, colour, music ; the smoothness of 
machinery, incredible and fantastic ingenuities. God has lost his 
half-hunter in the desert. 

But we have not come to worship among these Gothic beeches, 
for all their pillars and the lace-work of their green windows. We 
are looking for other things than churches. 



5 2 Leda 



VII 

TREES, the half-fossilised exuberances of a passionate life, 
petrified fountains of intemperance — ^with their abolition 
begins the realm of reason. 

Geometry, lines and planes, smooth edges, the ordered horror of 
perspectives. In this country there are pavements bright and sleek 
as water. The walls are precipices to which giants have nailed a 
perpetual cataract of marble. The fringes of the sky are scalloped 
with a pattern of domes and minarets. At night, too, the down- 
struck lamps are pyramids of phantom green and the perfect circle 
they make upon the pavement is magical. 

Look over the parapet of the Acropolis. The bridges go dizzily 
down on their swaying catenaries, the gull's flight chained fast. The 
walls drop clear into the valley, all the millions of basalt blocks calcined 
into a single red monolith, fluted with thirstily shining organ pipes, 
which seem for ever wet. There are no crevices for moss and toad- 
flax, and even the claws of the yellow lichen slip on its polished 
flanks. 

The valley is all paved and inlaid with rivers of steel. No trees, 
for they have been abolished. 

" Glorious unnature," cries the watcher at the parapet. His 
voice launches into the abyss, following the curve of the bridges. 
'' Glorious unnature. We have triumphed." 

But his laughter as it descends is like a flight of broken steps. 



Beauty 53 



VIII 

LET us abandon ourselves to Time, which is beauty's essence. We 
live among the perpetual degenerations of apotheoses. Sunset 
dissolves into soft grey snow and the deep ocean of midnight, boundless 
as forgetfulness or some yet undiscovered Pacific, contracts into the 
green puddle of the dawn. The flowers burn to dust with their own 
brightness. On the banks of ancient rivers stand the pitiful stumps 
of huge towers and the ghosts of dead men straining to return into 
life. The woods are full of the smell of transience. Beauty, then, 
is that moment of descent when apotheosis tilts its wings downwards 
into the gulf. The ends of the curve lose themselves parabolically 
somewhere in infinity. Our sentimental eyes see only the middle 
section of this degeneration, knowing neither the upper nor the 
lower extremes, which some have thought to meet, godhead and 
annihilation. 

Old Curiosity Shops ! If I have said " Mortality is beauty," it 
was a weakness. The sense of time is a symptom of anaemia of the soul, 
through which flows angelic ichor. We must escape from the dust 
of the shop. 

Cloistered darkness and sleep oflter us their lotuses. Not to per- 
ceive where all is ugly, eaten into by the syphilis of time, heart- 
sickening — this is beauty ; not to desire where death is the only con- 
summation — wisdom . 

Night is a measureless deep silence : daybreak brings back the 
foetid gutters of the town. O supreme beauty of a night that knows 
no limitations — stars or the jagged edges of cock-crowing. Desperate, 
my mind has desired it : never my blood, whose pulse is a rhythm of 
the world. 



54 



Leda 



At the other extreme, Beatrice lacks soHdity, is as unresponsive to 
your kisses as mathematics. She too is an oubHette, not a way of life ; 
an oubliette that, admittedly, shoots you upwards into light, not 
down to death ; but it comes to the same thing in the end. 

What, then, is the common measure ? To take the world as it is, 
but metaphorically, informing the chaos of nature with a soul, quali- 
fying transience with eternity. 

When flowers are thoughts, and lonely poplars fountains of aspiring 
longing ; when our actions are the poem of which all geographies 
and architectures and every science and all the unclassed individual 
odds and ends are the words, when even Helen's white voluptuousness 
matches some candour of the soul — then it will have been found, the 
permanent and living loveliness. 

It is not a far-fetched, dear-bought gem ; no pomander to be 
smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent ; it is not 
a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by 
state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an 
ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, mediaeval 
in its implication with the very threads of life. I desire no Paphian 
cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of ,Common 
Life, eating, drinking ; marrying and giving in marriage ; taking and 
taken in adultery ; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling 
immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating. 

Arduous search for one who is chained by his desires to dead car- 
cases, whose eyes are dimmed with tears by the slow heart-breaking 
twilights full of old family ghosts laid in lavender, whose despair cries 
out for opiate and anodyne, craving gross sleep or a place on the airy 
unsupported pinnacles which hang in the sterile upper chambers of 
ether. 

Ventre a terre, head in air — your centaurs are your only poets. 
Their hoofs strike sparks from the flints and they see both very near 
and immensely far. 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 55 



SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT 

FOREWORD 

JOHN RIDLEY, the subject of this poem, was killed in February 
1 91 8. " If I should perish,"he wrote to me only five weeks before 
his death, " if I should perish — and one isn't exactly a * good life ' 
at the moment — I wish you'd write something about me. It isn't 
vanity (for I know you'll do me, if anything, rather less than justice !), 
not vanity, I repeat ; but that queer irrational desire one has for im- 
mortality of any kind, however short and precarious — for frankly, 
my dear, I doubt whether your verses will be so very much more 
perennial than brass. Still, they'll be something. One can't, of 
course, believe in any au-dela for one's personal self ; one would have 
first to beheve in some kind of a friendly god. And as for being a 
spiritualist spook, one of those wretched beings who seem to spend 
their eternity in trying to communicate with the earth by a single 
telephone, where the number is always engaged, and the line chroni- 
cally out of order — well, all I can say is. Heaven preserve me from 
such a future life. No, my only hope is you — and a damned poor 
guarantee for eternity. Don't make of me a khaki image, I beg. I'd 
rather you simply said of me, as Erasmus did of his brother, ' Strenuus 
compotor, nee scortator ignavus.' I sincerely hope, of course, that 
you won't have to write the thing at all — hope not, but have very 
little doubt you will. Good-bye." 

The following poem is a tentative and provisional attempt to 
comply with his request. Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from 
that instability of mind " produced by^the mental conflict forced 
upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to 



56 Leda 

experience on the other " (I quote from Mr. Trotter's memorable work 
on Herd Instinct), that characteristic instability which makes adol- 
escence so feebly sceptical, so inefficient, so profoundly unhappy. I 
have fished up a single day from Ridley's forgotten existence. It has 
a bedraggled air in the sunlight, this poor wisp of Lethean weed. 
Fortunately, however, it will soon be allowed to drop back into the 
water, where we shall all, in due course, join it. " The greater part 
must be content to be as though they had not been." 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 57 



BETWEEN the drawing of the blind 
And being aware of yet another day- 
There came to him behind . 
Close, pregnant eyelids, like a flame of blue, 
Intense, untroubled by the wind, 
A Mediterranean bay, 
Bearing a brazen beak and foamless oars 
To where, marmoreally smooth and bright, 
The steps soar up in one pure flight 
From the sea's edge to the palace doors, 
That have shut, have shut their valves of bronze — 
And the windows too are lifeless eyes. 

The galley grated on the stone ; 

He stepped out — and was alone : 

No white-sailed hopes, no clouds, nor swans 

To shatter the ocean's calm, to break the sky's. 

Up the slow stairs : 

Did he know it was a dream ? 
First one foot up, then the other foot. 
Shuddering like a mandrake root 
That hears the truffle-dog at work 
And draws a breath to scream ; 
To moan, to scream. 

The gates swing wide. 
And it is coolly dark inside, 
And corridors stretch out and out. 



5S Leda 

Joining the ceilings to their floors, 
And parallels ring wedding bells 
And through a hundred thousand doors 
Perspective has abolished doubt. 

But one of the doors was shut, 

And behind it the subtlest lutanist 

Was shaking a broken necklace of tinkling notes, 

And somehow it was feminine music. 

Strange exultant fear of desire, when hearts 

Beat brokenly. He laid his hand on the latch — 

And woke among his familiar books and pictures ; 

Real as his dream ? He wondered. Ten to nine. 

Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's ? 

Distressing circumstance. 

But then he was taking Jenny out to dine. 

Which was some consolation. What a chin ! 

Civilized ten thousand years, and still 

No better way than rasping a pale mask 

With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian : 

Repulsive task ! 

And the more odious for being quotidian. 

If one should live till eighty-five . . . 

And the dead, do they still shave ^ The horrible dead, are they alive ? 

But that lute, playing across his dream . . . 

Quick drops breaking the sleep of the water-wheel. 

Song and ebbing whisper of a summer stream, 

Music's endless inconsequence that would reveal 

To souls that listened for it, the all 

Unseizable confidence, the mystic Rose, 

Could it but find the magical fall 

That droops, droops and dies into the perfect close . . . 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 59 

And why so feminine ? But one could feel 

The unseen woman sitting there behind 

The door, making her ceaseless slow appeal 

To all that prowls and growls in the caves beneath 

The libraries and parlours of the mind. 

If only one were rational, if only 

At least one had the illusion of being so . . . 

Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely ! 

He wept to think of all those single beds, 

Those desperate night-long solitudes. 

Those mental Salons full of nudes. 

Shelley was great when he was twenty-four. 

Eight thousand nights alone — -minus, perhaps, 

Six, or no ! seven, certainly not more. 

Five little bits of heaven 

(Tum-de-rum, de-rum, de-rum). 
Five little bits of Heaven and one that was a lapse, 
High-priced disgust : it stopped him suddenly 
In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine 
(Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infant's brightness), 
And he would shut his eyes so as not to see 
His own hot blushes calling him a swine. 
Atrocious memory ! For memory should be ^ 

Of things secure and dead, being past. 
Not living and disquieting. At last 
He threw the nightmare of his blankets off. 

Cloudy ammonia, camels in your bath : 
The earth hath bubbles as the water hath : 
He was not of them, too, too solidly 
Always himself. What foam of kissing lips. 
Pouting, parting with the ghost of the seven sips 
One smacks for hiccoughs ! 



6o Leda 

Pitiable to be 
Quite so deplorably naked when one strips. 

There was his scar, a panel of old rose 

Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose ; 

Adonis punctured hy his amorous boar, 

Permanent souvenir of the Great War. 

One of God's jokes, typically good. 

That wound of his. How perfect that he should 

Have suffered it for — ^what ? 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 6i 



II 

OH, the dear front page of the Times ! 
Chronicle of essential history : 
Marriage, birth, and the sly mysteriousness 
Of lovers' greetings, of lovers' meetings. 
And dirty death, impartially paid 
To courage and the old decayed. 
But nobody had been born to-day. 
Nobody married that he knew. 
Nobody died and nobody even killed ; 

He felt a little aggrieved — 

Nobody even killed. 
But, to make up : " Tuesday, Colchester train : 
Wanted Brown Eyes' address, with a view to meeting again. 
Dear Brown Eyes, it had been nice of her 
To talk so friendly to a lonely traveller ! 

Why is it nobody ever talks to me ? 

And now, here was a letter from Helen. 

Better to open it rather than thus 

Dwell in a long muse and maze 

Over the scrawled address and the postmark. 

Staring stupidly. 

Love — ^was there no escape ? 

Was it always there, always there ? 

The same huge and dominant shape. 

Like Windsor Castle leaning over the plain ; 

And the letter a vista cut through the musing forest. 



62 Leda 

At the end the old Round Tower, 

Singing its refrain : 

Here we are, here we are, here we are again ! 

The Hfe so short, so vast love's science and art, 
So many conditions of felicity. 

" DarUng, will you become a part 

Of my poor physiology ? 

And, my beloved, may I have 

The latchkey of your history ? 

And while this corpse is what it is 

Dear, we must share geographies." 
So many conditions of felicity. 
And now time was a widening gulf and space, 
A fixed between, and fate still kept them apart. 
Her voice quite gone ; distance had blurred her face. 
The life so short, so vast love's science and art. 

So many conditions — and yet, once, 

Four whole days. 

Four short days of perishing time, 

They had fulfilled them all. 

But that was long ago, ah ! long ago. 

Like the last horse bus, or the Christmas pantomime, 

Or the Bells, oh, the Bells, of Edgar Allan Poe. 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 63 



III 

" T T ELEN, your letter, proving, I suppose, 

X X That you exist somewhere in space, who knows ? 
Somewhere in time, perhaps, arrives this morning. 
Reminding me with a note of Lutheran warning 
That faith's the test, not works. Works ! — any fool 
Can do them if he tries to ; but what school 
Can teach one to credit the ridiculous, 
The palpably non-existent ? So with us, 
Votaries of the copulative cult. 
In this affair of love, quicumque vult. 
Whoever would be saved, must love without 
Adjunct of sense or reason, must not doubt 
Although the deity be far removed, 
Remote, invisible ; who is not loved 
Best by voluptuous works, but by the faith 
That lives in absence and the body's death. 
I have no faith, and even in love remain 
Agnostic. Are you here ? The fact is plain. 
Constated by the heavenly vision of you, 
Maybe by the mouth's warm touch ; and that I love you, 
I then most surely know, most painfully. 
But now you've robbed the temple, leaving me 
A poor invisibility to adore, 

Now that, alas, you're vanished, gone ... no more ; 
You take my drift. I only ask your leave 
To be a little unfaithful — not to you. 
My dear, to whom I was and will be true. 



64 Leda 

But to your absence. Hence no cause to grieve ; 
For absence may be cheated of a kiss — 
Lightly and laughing — ^with no prejudice 
To the so longed-for presence, which some day 
Will crown the presence of 

Le Vostre J. 
(As dear unhappy Troilus would say)." 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 65 



IV 

OH, the maggots, the maggots in his brains ! 
Words, words and words. 
A birth of rhymes and the strangest, 
The most unhkely superfoetations — 
New deep thoughts begot by a jingle upon a pun, 
New worlds glimpsed through the window of a word 
That has ceased, somehow, to be opaque. 
All the muses buzzing in his head. 
Autobiography crystallised under his pen, thus : 

" When I was young enough not to know youth, 

I was a Faun whose loves were Byzantine 

Among stiff trees. Before me naked Truth 

Creaked on her intellectual legs, divine 

In being inhuman, and was never caught 

By all my speed ; for she could outrun thought. 

Now I am old enough to know I am young, 
I chase more plastic beauties, but inspire 
Life in their clay, purity in their dung 
With the creative breath of my desire. 
And utter truth is now made manifest 
When on a certain sleeping face and breast 

The moonlight dreams and silver chords are strung, 
And a god's hand touches the aching lyre." 
5 



66 Leda 

He read it through : a pretty, clinquant thing, 

Like bright spontaneous bird-song in the spring. 

Instinct with instinct, full of dewy freshness. 

Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it ; 

If he chose to — but it was too much trouble. 

And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe, 

Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned 

In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find 

One o'clock struck and his unshaven face 

Still like a record in a musical box, 

And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury. 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 67 



I. 

THE Open Sesame of " Master John," 
And then the broad silk bosom of Aunt Loo. 
" Dear John, this is a pleasure. How are you ? " 
" Well, thanks. Where's Uncle Will ? " " Your uncle's gone 
To Bath for his lumbago. He gets on 
As well as anyone can hope to do 
At his age — ^for you know he's seventy-two ; 
But still, he does his bit. He sits upon 

The local Tribunal at home, and takes 
Parties of wounded soldiers out in brakes 
To see the country. And three times a week 
He still goes up to business in the City ; 
And then, sometimes, at night he has to speak 
In Village Halls for the War Aims Committee." 

II. 

" Well, have you any news about the war ? 

What do they say in France ? " "I daren't repeat 

The things they say." " You see we've got some meat 

For you, dear John. Really, I think before 

To-day I've had no lamb this year. We score 

By getting decent vegetables to eat. 

Sent up from home. This is a good receipt : 

The touch of garlic makes it. Have some more. 



68 Leda 

Poor Tom was wounded on the twenty-third ; 

Did you know that ? And just to-day I heard 

News from your uncle that his nephew James 

Is dead — Matilda's eldest boy." " I knew 

One of those boys, but I'm so bad at names. 

Mine had red hair." " Oh, now, that must be Hugh." 

III. 

" Colonel McGillicuddy came to dine 

Quietly here, a night or two ago. 

He's on the Staff and very much in the know 

About all sorts of things. His special line 

Is Tanks. He says we've got a new design 

Of super-Tank, with big guns, that can go 

(I think he said) at thirty miles or so 

An hour. That ought to make them whine 

For peace. He also said, if I remember, 

That the war couldn't last beyond September, 

Because the Germans' trucks were wearing out 

And couldn't be replaced. I only hope 

It's true. You know your uncle has no doubt 

That the whole thing was plotted by the Pope ..." 

'' . . . Good-bye, dear John. We have had a nice talk. 
You must soon come again. Good-bye, good-bye. . . . 

He tottered forth, full of the melancholy 
That comes of surfeit, and began to walk 
Slowly towards Oxford Street. The brazen sky 
Burned overhead. Beneath his feet the stones 
Were a grey incandescence, and his bones 
Melted within him, and his bowels yearned. 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 69 



VI 

THE crowd, the crowd — oh, he could almost cry 
To see those myriad faces hurrying by. 
And each a strong tower rooted in the past 
On dark unknown foundations, each made fast 
With locks nobody knew the secret of. 
No key could open : save that perhaps love 
Might push the bars half back and just peep in — 
And see strange sights, it may be. But for him 
They were locked donjons, every window bright 
With beckoning mystery ; and then. Good Night ! 
The lamp was out, they were passed, they were gone 
For ever . . . ever. And one might have been 
The hero or the friend long sought, and one 
Was the loveliest face his eyes had ever seen, 
(Vanished as soon) and he went lonely on. 

Then in a sudden fearful vision he saw 

The whole world spread before him — a vast sphere 

Of seething atoms moving to one law : 

" Be individual. Approach, draw near. 

Yes, even touch : but never join, never be 

Other than your own selves eternally." 

And there are tangents, tangents of thought that aim 

Out through the gaps between the patterned stars 

At some fantastic dream without a name 

That like the moon shining through prison bars. 

Visits the mind with madness. So they fly, 



70 Leda 

Those soaring tangents, till the first jet tires, 
Failing, faltering half-way up the sky. 
And breaks — poor slender fountain that aspires 
Against the whole strength of the heav}^ earth 
Within whose womb, darkly, it took birth. 

Oh, how remote he walked along the street, 
Jostling with other lumps of human meat ! 

He was so tired. The cafe doors invite. 

Caverned within them, still lingers the night 

In shadowy coolness, soothing the seared sight. 

He sat there smoking, soulless and wholly crass, 

Sunk to the eyes in the warm sodden morass 

Of his own guts, wearily, wearily 

Ruminating visions of mortality — 

Memento Moris from the pink alcove. 

Nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. 

Cesspool within, and without him he could see 

Nothing but mounds of flesh and harlotry. 

Like a half-pricked bubble pendulous in space, 

The buttered leatheriness of a Jew's face 

Looms through cigar-smoke ; red and ghastly white, 

Death's-head women fascinate the sight. 

It was the nightmare of a corpse. Dead, dead . . . 

Oh, to wake up, to live again ! he fled 

From that foul place and from himself. 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 71 



VII 

TWIN domes of the Alhambra, 
Veiled tenderness of the sky above the Square : 
He sat him down in the gardens, under the trees, 
And in the dust, with the point of his umbrella, 
Drew pictures of the crosses we have to bear. 

The poor may starve, the sick have horrible pains — 
But there are pale eyes even in the London planes. 

Men may make war and money, mischief and love — , 
But about us are colours and the sky above. i 

Yes, here, where the golden domes ring clear, 

And the planes patiently, hopefully renew 

Their green refrain from year to year 

To the dim spring burden of London's husky blue, 

Here he could see the folly of it. How ? 

Confine a boundless possible within 

The prison of an ineluctable Now ? 

Go slave to pain, woo forth original sin 

Out of her lair — and all by a foolish Act ? 

Madness ! But now, Wordsworth of Leicester Square, 

He'd learnt his lesson, learnt by the mere fact 

Of the place existing, so finely unaware 

Of syphilis and the restless in and out 

Of public lavatories, and evening shout 

Of winners and disasters, races and war. 



72 Leda 

Troubles come thick enough. Why call for more 

By suiting action to the divine Word ? 

His spleen was chronic, true ; but he preferred 

Its subtle agony to the brute force 

That tugged the barbs of deep-anchored remorse. 

The sunlight wrapped folds of soft golden silk 

About him, and the air was warm as milk 

Against his skin. Long sitting still had made 

Cramped soreness such a pleasure, he was afraid 

To shift his tortured limbs, lest he should mar 

Life's evenness. London's noise from afar 

Smoothed out its harshness to soothe his thoughts asleep, 

Sound that made silence much more calm and deep. 

The domes of gold, the leaves, emerald bright, 

Were intense, piercing arrows of delight. 

He did not think ; thought was a shallow thing 

To his deep sense of life, of mere being. 

He looked at his hand, lying there on his knee. 

The blue veins branching, the tendons cunningly 

Dancing like jacks in a piano if he shook 

A knot-boned finger. Only to look and look, 

Till he knew it, each hair and every pore — 

It Seemed enough : what need of anything more ? 

Thought, a blind alley ; action, which at best 

Is cudgelling water that goes back to rest 

As soon as you give over your violences. 

No, wisdom culls the flowers of the five senses, 

Savouring the secret sweetness they afford : 

Instead of which he had a Medical Board 

Next week, and they would pass him fit. Good Lord ! 

Well, let all pass. 

But one must outdo fate. 
Wear clothes more modish than the fashion, run 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 73 

Faster than time, not merely stand and wait ; 
Do in a flash what cannot be undone 
Through ten eternities. Predestinate ? 
So would God be — that is, if there were one : 
General epidemic which spoils nobody's fun. 
Action, action ' Quickly rise and do 
The most irreparable things ; beget, 
In one brief consummation of the will, 
Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret. 
Action ! This was no time for sitting still. 

He crushed his hat down over his eyes 
And walked with a stamp to symbolise 
Action, action — left, right, left ; 
Planting his feet with a slabby beat. 
Taking strange Procrustean steps. 
Lengthened, shortened to avoid 
Touching the lines between the stones — 
A thing which makes God so annoyed. 

Action, action ! First of all 

He spent three pounds he couldn't afford 

In buying a book he didn't want, 

For the mere sake of having been 

Irrevocably extravagant. 

Then feeling very bold, he pressed 

The bell of a chance house ; it might 

Disclose some New Arabian Night 

Behind its grimy husk, who knows ? 

The seconds passed ; all was dead. 

Arrogantly he rang once more. 

His heart thumped on sheer silence ; but at last 

There was a shuffling ; something behind the door 

Became approaching panic, and he fled. 



74 



Leda 



VIII 



MISERY," he said, " to have no chin, 
Nothing but brains and sex and taste : 
Only omissively to sin, 
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste. 

But when the war is over, 
I will go to the East and plant 
Tea and rubber, and make much money. 
I will eat the black sweat of niggers 
And flagellate them with whips. 
I shall be enormously myself, 
Incarnate Chin." 

The anguish of thinking ill of oneself 

(St. Paul's religion, poignant beyond words) 

Turns ere you know it to faint minor thirds 

Before the ritualistic pomps of the world — 

The glass-grey silver of rivers, silken skies unfurled, 

Urim and Thummim of dawn and sun-setting, 

And the lawn sleeves of a great episcopal cloud, 

Matins of song and vesperal murmuring, 

Incense of night-long flowers and earth new-ploughed ; 

All beauties of sweetness and all that shine or sing. 

Consience is smoothed by beauty's subtle fingers 

Into voluptuousness, where nothing lingers 

Of bitterness, saving a sorrow that is 

Rather a languor than a sense of pain. 

So, from the tunnel of St. Martin's Lane 
Sailing into the open Square, he felt 
His self-reproach, his good resolutions melt 
Into an ecstasy, gentle as balm. 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 75 

Before the spire, etched black and white on the calm 
Of a pale windless sky, St. Martin's spire, 
And the shadows sleeping beneath the portico 
And the crowd hurrj^ing, ceaselessly, to and fro. 
Alas, the bleached and slender tower that aches 
Upon the gauzy sky, where blueness breaks 
Into sweet hoarseness, veiled with love and tender 
As the dove's voice alone in the woods : too slender, 
Too finely pencilled — black and bleaching white 
On smoky mist, too clear in the keen light 
Of utmost summer : and oh I the lives that pass 
In one swift stream of colour, too, too bright. 
Too swift — and all the lives unknown, 

Alone. 

Alas. . . . 

A truce to summer and beauty and the pain 
Of being too consciously alive among 
The things that pass and the things that remain, 
(Oh, equal sadness !) the pain of being young. 

Truce, truce. . . . Once again he fled ; — 
All his life, it seemed, was a flight ; — 
Fled and found 
Sanctuary in a cinema house. 
Huge faces loomed and burst, 
Like bubbles in a black wind. 
He shut his eyes on them and in a httle 
Slept ; slept, while the pictures 
Passed and returned, passed once more and returned. 
And he, Hke God in the midst of the wheehng world. 
Slept on ; and when he woke it was eight o'clock. 
Jenny ? Revenge is sweet ; he will have kept 
Dear Jenny waiting. 



76 Leda 



IX 

TALL straight poplars stand in a meadow ; 
The wind and sun caress them, dappling 
The deep green grass with shine and shadow ; 
And a little apart one slender sapling 
Sways in the wind and almost seems 
Conscious of its own supple grace, 
And shakes its twin-hued leaves and gleams 
With silvery laughter, filHng the place 
Where it stands with a sudden flash of human 
Beauty and grace ; till from her tree 
Steps forth the dryad, now turned woman, 
And sways to meet him. It is she. 

Food and drink, food and drink : 
Olives as firm and sleek and green 
As the breasts of a sea god's daughter, 
Swimming far down where the corpses sink 
Through the dense shadowy water. 
Silver and black on flank and back. 
The glossy sardine mourns its head. 
The red anchovy and the beetroot red, 
With carrots, build a gorgeous stair — 
Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair — 
And the green pallor of the salad round 
Sharpens their clarion sound. 

De lady take hors d'oeuvres ? and de gentleman too ? 

Per due ! Due ! Echo answers : Du' . . . 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 77 

" So, Jenny, you've found another Perfect Man." 
" Perfect, perhaps ; but not so sweet as you. 
Not such a baby." " Me ? A baby. Why, 
I am older than the rocks on which I sit. . . ." 
Oh, how delightful, talking about oneself ! 

Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive, 

And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious : 

Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live. 

What though the mind still think that one thing's vicious 

More than another ? If the thought can give 

This wine's rich savour to our laughing kiss, 

Let us preserve the Christian prejudice. 

Oh, there are shynesses and silences, 

Shynesses and silences ! 

But luckily God also gave us wine. 

" Jenny, adorable — " (what draws the line 

At the mere word " love " ?) " has anyone the right 

To look so lovely as you look to-night. 

To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair ? " 

But candidly, he wondered, do I care ? 

He heard her voice and himself spoke, 

But like faint light through a cloud of smoke, 

There came, unreal and far away, 

Mere sounds utterly empty — like the drone 

Of prayers, cramhe repetita, prayers and praise. 

Long, long ago, in the old School Chapel days ; 

Senseless, but so intrusive on one's own 

Interior life one couldn't even think . . . 

O sweet, rare, perilous, retchy drink ! 
Another glass . . . 



yS Leda 



X 

HOW cool is the moonless summer night, how sweet 
After the noise and the dizzy choking heat ! 
The bloodless lamps look down upon their own 
Green image in the polished roadway thrown, 
And onward and out of sight the great road runs, 
Smooth and dark as a river of calm bronze. 

Freedom and widening space : his life expands, 

Ready, it seems, to burst the iron bands 

Of self, to fuse with other lives and be 

Not one but the world, no longer " I " but " She." 

See, like the dolorous memory 

Of happy times in misery, 

An aged hansom fills the street 

With the superannuated beat 

Of hollow hoofs and bells that chime 

Out of another quieter time. 

" Good-night," the last kiss, " and God bless you, my dear." 
So, she was gone, she who had been so near, 
So breathing-warm — soft mouth and hands and hair — 
A moment since. Had she been really there. 
Close at his side, and had he kissed her f It seemed 
Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed 
And talked about at breakfast, being a bore : 
Improbable, unsubstantial, dim, yet more 



Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 79 

Real than the rest of life ; real as the blaze 

Of a sudden-seen picture, as the lightning phrase 

With which the poet-gods strangely create 

Their brief bright world beyond the reach of fate. 

Yet he could wonder now if he had kissed 

Her or his own loved thoughts. Did she exist 

Now she was history and safely stowed 

Down in the past ? There (with a conscious smile), 

There let her rest eternal. And meanwhile, 

Lamp-fringed towards meeting parallels, the road 

Stretched out and out, and the old weary horse, 

Come from the past, went jogging his homeward course 

Uphill through time to some demoded place, 

On ghostly hoofs back to the safe Has-Been : — 

But fact returns insistent as remorse ; 

Uphill towards Hampstead, back to the year of grace 

Nineteen hundred and seventeen. 



8o Leda 



XI 



BETWEEN the drawing of the blind 
And being aware of yet another day 

/ 



PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EOINBURGH 



3'+77~7 



